Maryland is a U.S. state situated within the Mid Atlantic region of the nation, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east. Maryland was the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution, and three nicknames for it: the Old Line State, the Free State, and the Chesapeake Bay State are occasionally used. The state's most populated city is Baltimore. Its capital is Annapolis.
Maryland's economic activity is strongly concentrated in the tertiary service sector, and this sector, in turn, is strongly influenced by location. One major service activity is transportation, centered on the Port of Baltimore and its related rail and trucking access. The port ranked 17th within the United States by tonnage in the year 2008. Although the port handles a huge variety of products, the most usual imports are raw materials and bulk commodities, like iron ore, petroleum, sugar, and fertilizers, usually distributed to the rather close manufacturing centers of the inland Midwest via good overland transportation. The port likewise receives several various brands of imported motor vehicles and is the number two auto port in the nation
Because of its nearness to the government within Washington, D.C., a second service activity takes advantage of its location emphasizing technical and administrative tasks for the defense/aerospace industry as well as the numerous bio-research laboratories. What's more, lots of educational and medical research institutions are located within the state of Maryland. In fact, the different components of The Johns Hopkins University along with its medical research facilities are presently the largest single employer within the Baltimore area. Altogether, white collar technical and administrative employees comprise 25 percent of Maryland's work force, attributable partly to nearby state of Maryland being a part of the Washington Metro Area where there is relatively high federal government office employment.
The state of Maryland has a huge food-production sector. A huge part of this is commercial fishing, centered in Chesapeake Bay, but likewise consisting of activity off the short Atlantic seacoast. The largest catches by species are the blue crab, oysters, menhaden and striped bass. The Bay also has uncounted millions of overwintering waterfowl in its many wildlife refuges. While not, strictly speaking, a commercial food resource, the waterfowl support a tourism sector of sportsmen.
The state of Maryland is a key center for research in life sciences and development. There are approximately 400 biotechnology businesses within the state, making Maryland the fourth-largest biotech economy in the nation.
Within the state of Maryland, there are many government agencies and institutions with an interest in research and development, such as: the John Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory, the John Hopkins University, more than one campus of the University System of Maryland, the United States Census Bureau, Goodard Space Flight Center, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Celera Genomics company, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Human Genome Sciences (HGS),the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and MedImmune, which recently bought by AstraZeneca.